I argue that an icon in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the “circle of candles” represents an alternative to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilization” thesis. But I also put forward a public policy that initially may seem to contradict this alternative: group or cultural rights, beyond, and even sometimes conflicting with, individual rights. Such rights at first blush appear to ensconce the same sort of walled-in, homogeneous and exclusionary cultural entities that Huntington’s thesis implies I begin by stating Huntington’s thesis and the opposition to it that Amartya Sen has voiced in a recent book. I then provide a way of understanding the circle of candles that reinforces but also goes beyond the multi-identity type of multiculturalism that Sen places in opposition to Huntington’s warring monocultures. This understanding of the circle of candles, I will argue, shows how group or cultural rights, properly construed, can be incorporated into the type of hybrid society–what I call a “multivoiced body”– that constitutes a compelling alternative to the exclusionist responses to 9/11. My argument is reinforced by consideration of the current Zapatistas movement and their demands for group rights.

Of the major modernist poets, T.S. Eliot received the most extended academic training in philosophy, yet it is Wallace Stevens whose work has been most scrutinized from a philosophical perspective. Attempting to highlight those salient features which facilitate or advance philosophical thought, I question whether there is a significant development (between his first volume of poetry, Harmonium [1923], and his final volume, The Rock [1954]), of Stevens’ philosophical voice. Continuing with an analysis of the most recent and influential attempts to read Stevens’ poetry philosophically (Simon Critchley’s Things Merely Are [2005], Stanley Cavell’s “Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke” [2006] and Gregory Brazeal’s “Wallace Stevens’ Philosophical Evasions” [2007]), I argue that these readings raise interesting questions not only about philosophical poetry but about philosophical form as it is traditionally perceived.

This essay traces threads of nationalist sentiment from three different historical periods of 19th Century Britain, to pre-World War II Germany, to the United States of post-9/11, and evidences how even most noble expressions of nationalism and patriotism might be corrupted by the dominant cultural hegemonies. The term “nationalism” is frequently considered a synonym of “patriotism.” Although the terms emphasize the value of self-determination and solidarity among members of nation-states, nationalism is the governing principle that unifies disparate social entities through a common national identity that is made accessible to many but not all members of the public. Patriotism is the attitudes and behaviors we exhibit within a public forum to validate our placement within national discourse. How we synchronize nationalist agendas with patriotic fervor determines our success in nation-building and in the creation of a global community responsive to needs and interests of our human condition, a condition that dwarfs and precedes all other ideologies and modes of classification. The prefigurations of culture and society predispose us toward assuming a normalized subjectivity that predicts potential patterns of behavior and attitudes in response to hegemonic domination. In seeking to refine and preserve national identity, each of these societies has embraced the replication of hegemony and situated oppositional narratives within coercive doctrines of patriotism and national unity.

“The Innsmouth Look: H. P. Lovecraft’s Ambivalent Modernism” explores how horror writing responds to the anxieties and possibilities presented by historical modernity. Lovecraft, in his short story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” translated contemporary concerns about immigration, industrialization and racial difference into a plot about a young traveler encountering a terrifying alien population in a small New England town. The essay examines the ways that this story both demonstrates how the dehumanization of the racialized “other” operated during the modern period, and exposes the inherent fallacy in such objectification. Though the aliens in the story are physically distinct, and the visual difference provokes disgust and withdrawal in the narrator, this “Innsmouth look” also reveals the way the objectified other is always looking back, a subject in his or her own right.

Contrary to Eliot’s charge that Hamlet is lacking in literary form, the philosophical form of the Cartesian Cogito, which Hamlet embodies in terms of the instability of the Cogito’s determined reason and determined madness, and complicates in terms of not having the theological backing that is offered to the Cogito’s philosophical “blind spot,” provides insight into Hamlet’s response to his mother’s sexual behavior. Correspondingly, Erikson’s insight that doubt is the brother of shame explains how Hamlet, burdened by his unguarded philosophical doubts about the ontological and moral nature of the Ghost and its command of revenge, negatively projects his sense of shame into his perception of his mother’s behavior; thus filling the gap of Eliot’s objective correlative.